Integrating Lync 2010 with Exchange 2010 - Part 3

Paul is a Microsoft Certified System Engineer since 1999.
His experience covers a large number of Microsoft Exchange implementations starting from small infrastructures and going to large hosting infrastructures for thousands of users.
Starting with April 1st, 2010, Paul is MVP for Exchange.

Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging brings voice and e-mail messaging into one place. Integrating Lync with Exchange we get a voice solution that replaces and is dramatically better than standard PBX solutions.

Exchange 2010 and Lync 2010 Voice Integration

Exchange Server 2010 Unified Messaging helps you get voice messaging and e-mail messaging into one place, accessible from a normal phone or a computer. Integrating Lync Server 2010 with Exchange we get a voice solution that replaces and is dramatically better than standard PBX solutions. Here are the steps needed to achieve this integration.

Configure certificates - Make sure that you have digital certificates installed and configured on each UM server. The certificates have to be issued by a root CA trusted by the Exchange and Lync servers.

To find out if a certificate is in use for UM, from the Exchange Management Shell run: Get-ExchangeCertificate

The one that has U as service is the one that you need.

If no certificate is selected for the UM role, at the Exchange Management Shell on the server(s) that have the UM role installed, run: Enable-ExchangeCertificate -thumbprint <CertificateThumbprint> -Services UM

<CertificateThumbprint> is the thumbprint of the certificate that will be used for this service.

Create and configure an Exchange UM SIP dial plan.

You need to create a SIP dial plan on the Exchange UM server and then associate the Unified Messaging servers to it.

This will create a new Dial Plan with the following settings: UMDialPlan - the name of the new dial plan 5 - the number of digits available in the extension numberSipName - means that this dial plan will support SIP URIsSecured - means that the traffic will be encrypted using mutual Transport Layer Security (TLS).44 - is the region code for UK.

This tool will create Subscriber Access and Auto Attendant contact objects. It will also validate that there is an Enterprise Voice dial plan with a name that matches the Exchange UMdialplan FQDN. If you are running Exchange Server 2010 SP1, the dial plan names do not need to match, and you can ignore the tool's warning about this.

Click Load Data to get the information from Active Directory. This will bring you a screen like this:

Click Add to add a Subscriber Access contact

Click Add to add an Auto-Attendant contact

Finally you should get a screen like this. You can safely ignore the warning if you are using Exchange 2010 SP1 or later

Enable Enterprise Voice users for Exchange UM

The last step that you need to do is to enable Voice users to be able to use the Exchange UM. To do that, run the following Exchange Management Shell cmdlet: Enable-UMMailbox -Identity testuser@testdomain.com -UMMailboxPolicy UMPolicy -Extensions 12345 -SIPResourceIdentifier testuser@testdomain.com -Pin 23753465 -PinExpired $true

This will enable testuser@testdomain.com for ExchangeUM.

To find out more about this command check the TechNet documentation for Enable-UMMailbox.

Conclusion

This completes our journey in the integration of Exchange 2010 and Lync 2010. Once you are a little bit familiar with both products, getting this to work is fairly easy.

Integration pays dividends in terms of productivity as users are able to employ both products through the same interfaces they work with every day. So it is definitely worth the effort. Integration should indeed be at the top of your priority list once these two products are deployed.